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Vodafone takes T-Mobile’s iPhone contract to task

A German court has granted a preliminary injunction against T-Mobile over its …

Starting yesterday evening, news started to seep out from every which way that a court had ordered T-Mobile to begin selling unlocked iPhones in Germany, but details were sketchy and there was a lot of speculation. As of today, however, things at least seem to be straightened out enough such that we know WTF is going on.

And here it is: Vodafone Deutschland had filed a motion with a German court to have T-Mobile's exclusive rights to the iPhone examined. The court took a look and decided to grant Vodafone a preliminary injunction against T-Mobile, ordering T-Mobile to change its policies on the iPhone by this Wednesday (tomorrow). This indicates that T-Mobile may be forced to sell the iPhone without the current 24-month contract that it currently requires, or it could end up being something else.

Whatever that change may amount to will be in effect until the court can re-review the case in another couple of weeks. However, T-Mobile doesn't feel that it needs to change anything, as the toldMarketWatch that it plans to oppose the injunction. T-Mobile Deutschland plans to continue selling the iPhone as it has been since November 9, and that it reserves the right to claim damages against Vodafone.

As to whether Vodafone plans to follow the iPhone all over Europe with its legal requests, the answer is apparently no. "We're not taking any plans to replicate these actions anywhere else, or in the UK," a Vodafone spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. "It's a different regulatory environment. We believe it's more to do with a breach of local German laws."

Vodafone specifically believes that iPhones should be sold without contract (or at least with a modified contract), meaning that users should be able to just pick up and hop over to Vodafone at any time without penalty. This could also mean that, in the long term, Vodafone would also like iPhones to be unlocked (because without an unlock, those users can't skip over to Vodafone with their iPhones anyway), but an unlock wasn't specifically mentioned by a company spokesperson to the WSJ or Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

This isn't the first time such concerns have been brought up in Europe. The iPhone is due to go on sale in France starting next week, where it will remain exclusive to Orange... for a while. An Orange spokesperson said in October that the company plans to start selling unlocked iPhones after six months, but Apple countered the statement, saying that Orange was merely citing French law and had no specific plans. What will ultimately end up happening in France is anyone's guess, but T-Mobile users stateside (namely, me) will be following the German case closely in hopes that we may, one day, be able to buy freed iPhones from overseas. Hey, one can dream, right?

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui